Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The university is the result of a merger of the Carnegie Institute of Technology and the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research. The predecessor was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools, and it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1912 and began granting four-year degrees. In 1967, the Carnegie Institute of Technology merged with the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research, founded in 1913 by Andrew Mellon and Richard B. Mellon and formerly a part of the University of Pittsburgh. Carnegie Mellon has operated as a single institution since the merger.
IDEO is a design and consulting firm with offices in the U.S., England, Germany, Japan, and China. It was founded in Palo Alto, California, in 1991. The company's 700 staff uses a design thinking approach to design products, services, environments, and digital experiences.
The School of Computer Science (SCS) at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, US is a school for computer science established in 1988. It has been consistently ranked among the top computer science programs over the decades. As of 2022 U.S. News & World Report ranks the graduate program as tied for second with Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley. It is ranked second in the United States on Computer Science Open Rankings, which combines scores from multiple independent rankings.
Dabbala Rajagopal "Raj" Reddy is an Indian-American computer scientist and a winner of the Turing Award. He is one of the early pioneers of artificial intelligence and has served on the faculty of Stanford and Carnegie Mellon for over 50 years. He was the founding director of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He was instrumental in helping to create Rajiv Gandhi University of Knowledge Technologies in India, to cater to the educational needs of the low-income, gifted, rural youth. He is the chairman of International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad. He is the first person of Asian origin to receive the Turing Award, in 1994, known as the Nobel Prize of Computer Science, for his work in the field of artificial intelligence.
Interaction design, often abbreviated as IxD, is "the practice of designing interactive digital products, environments, systems, and services." Beyond the digital aspect, interaction design is also useful when creating physical (non-digital) products, exploring how a user might interact with it. Common topics of interaction design include design, human–computer interaction, and software development. While interaction design has an interest in form, its main area of focus rests on behavior. Rather than analyzing how things are, interaction design synthesizes and imagines things as they could be. This element of interaction design is what characterizes IxD as a design field as opposed to a science or engineering field.
William Grant Moggridge, RDI was an English designer, author and educator who cofounded the design company IDEO and was director of the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York. He was a pioneer in adopting a human-centred approach in design, and championed interaction design as a mainstream design discipline. Among his achievements, he designed the first laptop computer, the GRiD Compass, was honoured for Lifetime Achievement from the National Design Awards, and given the Prince Philip Designers Prize. He was quoted as saying, "If there is a simple, easy principle that binds everything I have done together, it is my interest in people and their relationship to things."
Edwin Joseph Selker, better known as Ted Selker, is an American computer scientist known for his user interface inventions.
Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley is a degree-granting branch campus of Carnegie Mellon University located in the heart of Silicon Valley in Mountain View, California. It was established in 2002 at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field.
The Bernard M. Gordon Prize was started in 2001 by the United States National Academy of Engineering. Its purpose is to recognize leaders in academia for the development of new educational approaches to engineering. Each year, the Gordon Prize awards $500,000 to the grantee, of which the recipient may personally use $250,000, and his or her institution receives $250,000 for the ongoing support of academic development. Although the Gordon Prize is relatively new, within engineering education, it is viewed by many to be the American equivalent of the Nobel Prize.
Conceptual economy is a term describing the contribution of creativity, innovation, and design skills to economic competitiveness, especially in the global context.
Design thinking refers to the set of cognitive, strategic and practical procedures used by designers in the process of designing, and to the body of knowledge that has been developed about how people reason when engaging with design problems.
Social design is the application of design methodologies in order to tackle complex human issues, placing the social issues as the priority. Historically social design has been mindful of the designer's role and responsibility in society, and of the use of design processes to bring about social change. Social design as a discipline has been practiced primarily in two different models, as either the application of the human-centered design methodology in the social sector or governmental sector, or sometimes is synonymously practiced by designers who venture into social entrepreneurship.
William "Bill" Lawrence Verplank is a designer and researcher who focuses on interactions between humans and computers. He is one of the pioneers of interaction design, a field of design that focuses on users and technology, and a term he helped coin in the 1980s. He was previously a visiting scholar at Stanford University's CCRMA and was involved in Stanford's d.school. He also teaches and lectures internationally on interaction design.
John Keithan Coyle is an American short track speedskater who was part of the U.S. silver medal-winning relay team at the 1994 Winter Olympics. He is also an author, speaker and Design Thinking expert.
Pradeep Kumar Khosla is an Indian-American computer scientist and university administrator.
Rolf A. Faste (1943–2003) was an American designer who made major contributions to the fields of human-centered design and design education. He is best known for his contributions to design thinking which he advanced as a 'whole person' approach to problem solving centered on the perception of needs. He was professor of industrial design at Syracuse University from 1971 to 1983, and professor of mechanical engineering and director of the Stanford Joint Program in Design from 1984 to 2003.
The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, commonly known as the d.school, is a design thinking institute based at Stanford University. David M. Kelley and Bernard Roth founded the program. According to the New York Times, the d.school has become one of the most highly sought academic programs at Stanford.
Brian Witlin is an American businessman and fine artist. He is a serial entrepreneur who has co-founded a number of tech companies including Leverworks, Shopwell, Golaces and has led Yummly as its CEO both before and after being acquired by Whirlpool in 2017. Witlin participates as a lecturer at Stanford University's Hasso Plattner Institute of Design.
Mike Nuttall is a British designer who established Matrix Product Design in 1983 in Palo Alto, California. In 1991, his company merged with two other established design firms, David Kelley Design and ID Two to form the influential design firm IDEO.
Srikant Datar is an Indian-American economist and the Dean of Harvard Business School. At Harvard, he concurrently serves as the Arthur Lowes Dickinson Professor of Business Administration. In 2021, he was awarded the Padma Shri, the fourth-highest civilian award in India.
